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| -Short Attention Span Theater- |
| Woohoo! Toilet pump loaded aboard space shuttle after all! |
| 2008-05-30 |
| After being rushed in from Russia, a toilet pump was loaded into space shuttle Discovery on Thursday just in time for this weekend's liftoff to the international space station, where the lone commode is acting up. Shoulda shipped two, but this will hopefully do for now. A NASA employee based in Moscow hand-carried the pump on a commercial flight that touched down Wednesday night. Within hours, the pump and related equipment were packed away aboard Discovery. Well waddaya know, there was room after all! Someone must have worked lots of overtime figuring out where to put that thing so it wouldn't upset the delicate center of gravity of that zillion pound beast! Discovery is scheduled to blast off Saturday on a 14-day mission. The main delivery item is a 37-foot-long Japanese lab; it will be the biggest room once installed at the space station. Good weather was forecast for the late afternoon launch, and the countdown was going well. While the three space station residents are eager to see the Kibo lab, the bathroom situation has become a more pressing issue. For the past week, the two Russian and one American men have had to periodically manually flush the urine side of the Russian-built toilet. The job takes 10 minutes and requires two people. Five minutes if they have to go to the bathroom. "Insert that into your daily life and you can see it would be quite inconvenient," Kirk Shireman, NASA's deputy space station program manager, said at a news conference. The solid-waste part of the toilet is working properly. The American on board, Garrett Reisman, will return to Earth aboard Discovery after a three-month stay. His replacement, Gregory Chamitoff, will have to deal with any lingering bathroom problems. NASA plans to launch another Russian toilet aboard a space shuttle later this year, along with other equipment that will enable the space station crew size to double. Very diplomatically put. |
| Posted by:gorb |
| #7 ..In the classic sci-fi spoof 'Dark Star', there's a great 'captain's log' takeoff where the skipper says their radiation shielding is collapsing and they are out of TP - and since there's room or only one of those items on the supply shuttle...they ordered the TP. Mike |
| Posted by: Mike Kozlowski 2008-05-30 19:22 |
| #6 $. PIMF |
| Posted by: ed 2008-05-30 19:15 |
| #5 Wait till NASA gets the %500 million plumber's bill. |
| Posted by: ed 2008-05-30 19:14 |
| #4 Watch out for "yellow ice". |
| Posted by: crosspatch 2008-05-30 18:52 |
| #3 Hell, don't they have airlocks and bags? |
| Posted by: George Smiley 2008-05-30 18:37 |
| #2 ...delicate center of gravity of that zillion pound beast! HA! |
| Posted by: RD 2008-05-30 15:11 |
| #1 Put two toilets not one... put the other outside in cold storage as a spare that can be retrieved with a simple spacewalk.... And if you have 3 adults in a house you need at least 2 toilets. Why are they so cheap? |
| Posted by: 3dc 2008-05-30 10:13 |